Daughter
by SaSaSaShika
Summary: Naruto and Hinata have a beautiful daughter. Only, there isn't a happy ever after in their lives because she mysteriously vanished. Where could she be hiding and what does a blind girl have to do with it? Even if she is the same age...


**Foreword- obviously, these characters (minus pretty much everybody not in Konoha) is mine. Nana, her parents, brothers, sister, etc. etc. are all mine. Naruto, Kakashi, Iruka, etc. etc. are Masashi Kishimoto's. I hope you all enjoy this and I hope I get lots of responses. Tell me what you think!**

Well, she had always thought she belonged to the people who raised her- Gingko and Chun. It had never crossed her mind that maybe; just maybe, she was actually the daughter of Uzumaki Naruto and Hyuuga Hinata. Why should it? When you are brought up by two people who were brought up in a camp of orphanages and took in everybody who accepted them as their family it really wouldn't cross your mind that some people aren't really your parents. She actually had three sets of parents. Ginkgo and Chun were one, then Alice and Max, then Bo and Gin. They all took care of her, but she spent most time with Gingko and Chun. They were all her family. And she had at least twenty siblings if you didn't count the ones that were now grownups. Fifteen of them had grown up since she had started living with The Lost Clan.

She hadn't even really considered the name, The Lost Clan. How could you be lost if everywhere was your home? Everybody she had ever known was her brother, sister, mother, father or some other relative that they never bothered giving names for.

All it took was one wounded foreign ninja to muck it all up again.

Hatake Kakashi was a great ninja. Humble, swift, intelligent, and accomplished-everything a ninja should be. Unfortunately, he was just like every other ninja in one regard. He got hurt. Well, what did everybody expect from him: to be perfect?

On a routine surveillance mission an idiot ninja had gotten past his defenses (a genius really, but he wasn't going to say it out loud) and slashed a nasty wound across his stomach. Kami how that had hurt. His partner, Iruka (why had they sent a chuunin to do a man's job?) stitched him up as best he could. A large group of nomads found them and lent to his recovery. It looked like they'd be stuck here for a while if they wanted to get him home in one piece.

He lay behind a curtain in a large tent. A girl no older than thirteen opened the curtain and plopped down on a stool beside him. Her hair was a shiny blonde that swept down past her shoulders like a waterfall. Her eyes stood covered with a white bandage that wrapped around her head.

"Feeling better today, Ninja-san?" she asked.

"A bit. Thank you for asking. Any clue how long I might be here?"

She thought for a little while. "Since you are a ninja I suppose you heal a little faster than normal people, no? If you were a regular person I would make you stay in bed for another two weeks but I suppose you won't have that. I suppose you'll be here for another week in bed and half a week to get your oomph back. Sound good to you?"

He laughed. "You are very intelligent Nana-san. I was quizzing you. You passed with flying colors."

"Would you," she scooted closer, "tell me about yourself? You're always quizzing and analyzing and questioning and observing. What do you do on your free time and do you have family and has this injury been holding you up much? Seems to me like a ninja lives a full life but you have boundaries. Maybe I could be the first to discover them! That would make me very famous around here. Getting inside a ninja's head. Underneath the underneath, you know?"

He stared at her. Had she just said that? He said that. Surely his little quip hadn't gotten passed around the entire land of fire.

Right?

And she was incredibly watchful, he noticed. He commented on this and she blushed a little.

"I have no family to speak of, only comrades. And in my free time I like to read, and train, and go on walks. I'm a teacher; at least I was for a number of years. Now I have given up teaching and just do regular ninja missions." He eye-smiled at her. He refused to have his face unmasked to this day, no matter Iruka's begging.

"What did you teach and why don't you do that now?"

"Wait a minute," he admonished, "why are you here? Are you hiding from someone?"

She blushed slightly. "Maybe. Hey- I asked a question and I demand an answer, mister!"

He held up his hands. "Alright, alright, I'll tell you. I taught three genins and I don't teach anymore because I feel like I did enough teaching with the tree of them. They took a lot of effort to look after. Besides…"

"Besides what?" she quipped. She could tell this meant a lot to him, but she had to know.

"I couldn't go through being disappointed in another student like I was one of mine." He sighed. She watched and waited for him to continue. "He was a prodigy, he was. Strong, smart, a genius in all three ninja arts-taijutsu, genjutsu, and ninjutsu, that is. He was top of his class, even had all the girls swooning after him since age seven. He was focused, always focused. It took me years to figure out, but he really was focused on becoming strong enough to kill his older brother."

"That's awful!" She screamed. "Why would anyone hate their brother enough to kill them? What could he possibly have done?"

"He killed his entire clan, except his younger brother." She was silent. They both were for a minute.

"Why…why would anybody kill their entire clan?"

"It's a long story, but the short version is it was on orders. Nobody knows whose," he lied. "Anyway, Sasuke grew up hating just about everything, even his other teammates. He even tried to kill them both once or twice. He betrayed our village and his comrades and joined Orochimaru."

"So…this Sasuke…tried to kill his brother and his friends. I can see why it was disappointing. I'm very sorry."

"You have nothing to be sorry about. It wasn't your fault. It was mine. I should have seen the signs and protected him from that anger. He went so far that when he finally stopped, there was nothing left for him. So he killed himself. Poor Naruto and found him and dragged him all the way home just to be turned around at the gates and refused admittance for burial of his best friend."

"Wait," Nana interrupted. "Naruto was your other student? And they were best friends even though Sasuke hated pretty much everything and then your village wouldn't bury him?"

"Correct. Sasuke and Naruto, even though they didn't show it through actions or words very often, were very loyal friends. I think it broke something in both of them when he left-"

"So why did he leave?"

Kakashi sighed sadly. "Orochimaru…his brother…maybe neither, probably both, made him leave. Naruto and his bond wasn't strong enough to keep him there. It's a sad story, but it's true."

She thought for a minute. "Who is this Orochimaru anyways?"

He coughed. "You don't know who Orochimaru is?" She shook her head. "I shouldn't be surprised. He was killed by Sasuke before you were born. Actually-how old are you?"

"Thirteen. I'm lost again; so he left his home to follow this guy who he then killed?"

"Precisely."

"But…that doesn't…what?"

"Exactly. He probably found out just how slime that guy really was. Let's see, if you are thirteen, then he was defeated…two years before you were conceived. Yes, because he was seventeen, so was Naruto, and Naruto had his daughter nearly three years after that. Yup. His daughter would be about your age now." He closed his eyes again.

"What do you mean, she would be? Did she die?" Nana asked.

"Nobody knows. Kami I hope she's alright. She was stolen just after her third birthday. Kami…."

Nana gasped. That was so awful! How could anybody take a baby girl? She was afraid to ask, but she thought she might anyways. "And…and Naruto? What happened to him and the mother?"

"Heartbroken. Never had another child and the spark went right out of them."

They sat in silence for minutes just contemplating and remembering.

"It's funny…"she started. "Everybody here has lost their parents. That's how we got our name. Nobody here is related beyond the parents who had their kids after they joined. That's what makes us special. We have so many people from so many places. Some of us even come from ninja villages, like my father Gin. But he was never a ninja. His father was, but he never learned to fight because he never wanted to. Anyway, I was thinking…your student's daughter is about my age now. When she was three, she disappeared. And when I was three, I got lost from my family, too. Maybe… maybe her spirit guided me to the right clearing at the right time and I helped me find Gingko and Chun and everybody else here. Do you think?"

He sighed. "If I believed in spirits beyond my occasional mutterings to my passed friends, I would say yes. But I don't, so I won't. However- it sounds like a great explanation. And what a coincidence, too. Little Meiko getting kidnapped the same time you got lost. Do you remember everything about your old family?"

She shook her head. "Just a smell I smell sometimes and a familiar saying. You know- underneath the underneath. Nobody around here says it but I hear it in my dreams sometimes, just like the smell, so I assume it's them. I think they were nice because I don't remember a lot, but I don't remember ever being scared. I wasn't scared before I got lost in the woods, anyway."

"Nana, what color are your eyes?" he asked out of the blue.

She got really quiet and then she said "I don't really like them. Nobody here has ever seen eyes like them before. They're all grey and stuff and weird. I haven't ever actually seen them because I can only see in black and white but people tell me they are an odd shade. Like clouds or rain."

He sucked in a breath, not believing what he was hearing. "Nana, you can see?"

"Yes of course. Just not in color like everybody else."

"You mean when you take your blindfold off?"

"I'm still wearing a blindfold? I can see you right now, through it then. Isn't that the weirdest thing you've even seen?"

"Oh my god," he said. "You're Meiko."


End file.
